


The Woman Who Ran with Wolves

by drekadair



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10434774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drekadair/pseuds/drekadair
Summary: Peter and Nightingale are called to the Epping Forest to investigate a potential werewolf and discover a missing woman, a family shattered by grief, and a case that hits far too close to home.





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> While no suicide occurs in this story, suicide and suicidal ideation are discussed. If such topics are difficult for you to read about, this may not be the story for you.

And you once said, “I wish you dead, you sinner.”  
I’ll never be more than a wolf at your door for dinner.  
\- “Wolf,” Phildel 

## Part One

Weekend mornings at the Folly are a leisurely affair. Unless there’s an urgent case there’s no police work and Nightingale doesn’t make me practice magic, either. Molly still serves breakfast at eight o’clock sharp, though, so I don’t really get to lay around in bed unless I want a dirty look from her when I creep into the kitchen late looking for leftovers. Not that I spend much time in laying in bed these days, what with post-Lesley insomnia and all, and anyway I’ve stayed at Beverly’s almost every weekend since we got back from Herefordshire. But Beverly had kicked me out to study for her first chemistry quiz and I’d actually started sleeping better lately—Nightingale would probably attribute it to the beneficial effects of country air, which is why I didn’t say anything to him about it—so I actually slept in that morning and that’s why I came down to breakfast half an hour late.

Molly glared at me as I slipped into the breakfast room and I gave her my best little-boy grin, the one I’ve used against both Lady Ty and my own mum, but Molly was visibly unimpressed. Nightingale was at the table doing the crossword with a cup of tea at his elbow, but his plate had already been whisked away. There was still plenty of food, though, so I helped myself and sat opposite him.

“Good morning,” he said without looking up.

“Morning,” I answered. He was wearing a pale blue shirt and gray tweed blazer but no tie—it was, after all, a Saturday. He still put my khakis and navy jumper to shame, but I knew I had no hope of keeping up with Nightingale so I wasn’t bothered by it. I applied myself to tea and toast and was about to ask Nightingale to spare me a section of paper—I wasn’t picky, even the sports would do—when the phone rang.

Molly, approaching the table with a fresh pot of tea, paused. We all stared at one another before I remembered myself and got up to answer it. Usually when someone from the Met needed us they knew to call my cell phone, since a call to the landline was usually just met by Molly’s creepy silence. I picked up the receiver in the lobby on the fifth ring and said, “Folly.”

There was a pause and then a woman asked, “Is this the Specialist Assessment Unit?”

“That’s us.”

“Do you know anything about werewolves?”

I hesitated. “Who is this, please?”

She introduced herself as Diane Paget, a DCI with the Essex Territorial Police Force who thought she had a werewolf on her hands.

“A werewolf,” I repeated.

“That’s what you deal with, isn’t it?” she asked. “Werewolves and weird stuff like that.”

Werewolves were new, but weird stuff I was used to. “What makes you think there’s a werewolf involved?”

Late Thursday night Lynn Macey, widow and mother of two, had vanished from her home in Theydon Bois, which I thought was northeast of London somewhere. There was no sign of violence and if it hadn’t been for the two parentless kids the police might not have been too concerned. Then early this morning a jogger found Macey’s torn clothes in the Epping Forest, only half a kilometer from her house.

“I took one look at the scene and knew something was off,” Paget said.

The clothes, the same ones Macey had been wearing Thursday night, were in a loose heap near a popular footpath. The soft earth and leaf litter was perfect for holding footprints, and sure enough there was a clear set of prints matching Macey’s shoes leading up to the scene—and large canine prints leading away.

It did sound suspicious, but nothing I’d read so far suggested werewolves were common and the moon was only in the first quarter—after dealing with unicorns in Rushpool I’d made it a habit to keep track of the current lunar phase. Still, no police officer called the Folly without being well and truly desperate, so Paget was either crazy or really convinced there was something odd about her case.

“Let me check some references,” I told her. “I’ll get right back to you.”

I jotted down her number on the notepad next to the phone and went back to the breakfast room. I could double-check Wolfe’s _Exotica_ but asking Nightingale was faster.

“Werewolves?” Nightingale said, when I told him about Paget’s missing person. “As far as I know, there aren’t any in here in Britain.”

Apparently werewolves had always been more of a European thing. Reports from the British Isles were rare, and none of them confirmed. Even Continental cases were poorly documented, leading some to doubt their very existence.

“Wolfe thought the stories come from people affected by some kind of magical delusion, didn’t he?” I asked, thinking back on all the reading I’d done to figure out what the Pale Lady was.

“ _Seducere_ ,” Nightingale agreed. “Like poor Melvin Starkey.”

Who had been glamored by the spirit of the Grand Union canal into believing he was a rat. “What about the Nazis?” I asked. “Didn’t they have werewolves?”

Nightingale sipped his tea thoughtfully. “We were never entirely sure what their capabilities were,” he said. “They were certainly practitioners of some sort and were called _werwölfe_ , but we had no evidence they could actually transform themselves into wolves. It does seem unlikely,” he added. “Such magic would be extraordinarily difficult for a human practitioner, if possible at all.”

“For a _human_ practitioner,” I repeated. “Could some kind of fae do this?”

“There are some…” I could see him hesitating over the word _species_ , or possibly _races_. “…types of fae capable of changing their shape. They are extremely rare, and to my knowledge none of them are capable of taking the shape of a wolf or any other kind of canine.”

“So probably not a werewolf in Theydon Bois, then.”

“Probably not,” Nightingale agreed. “What was your impression of DCI Paget?”

“She didn’t sound crazy,” I said, knowing what he meant. “Or like she was trying to fob the case off on our budget.”

“Then she must be desperate,” Nightingale said. “Perhaps it would be best for you to drive out and have a look ‘round.”

So much for my Saturday, I thought, and went to give Paget the good news.

* * *

I took the A12 east, crossing the River Lea at Stratford and heading north on the M11. The road paralleled the River Roding for a while; I caught a few glimpses of it through the trees, beginning to show their fall colors, on my left. I spent some time trying to remember where the Roding emptied into the Thames and whether I had met her yet before my satnav had me get off at Loughton. Leafy suburbs gave way to farm fields and patchy forest, with a couple golf courses thrown in for variety. It was more urban than Herefordshire, which was good because I’d just about had my fill of the country, but also more wooded. I drove through Theydon Bois proper, which was a nice little village, though strangely lacking in streetlights, and onto a side street that cut through the Epping Forest. After missing my turn and having to double back, I found myself in a small gravel lot beside a row of seriously nice houses with gated drives and privacy hedges—some of which, I noted, included what looked suspiciously like small palm trees.

There was a uniformed PC and a woman in a white button-down shirt and heavy-duty khakis waiting for me in the lot next to an elderly Ford Escort that was just as obviously ex-panda as mine was. There were two other cars in the lot, a gray Astra and a late-model Prius. I squeezed the Asbo between the Astra and the Prius and walked over to say hello.

The PC was a mixed-race man about my age but a few shades lighter named Gabriel Zuberi. His companion turned out to be a Forest Keeper, a tall, willowy Asian woman with a solid Estuary accent who introduced herself as Min Ji Yi. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and they told me DCI Paget had asked them to show me to the scene when I arrived.

We started down a wide trail leading from the lot into the forest, along the side of the first of the row of houses. Another high hedge blocked the view into the house’s back yard on our left; to the right, the trees were just turning brilliant bronze and gold above a thick carpet of leaf litter and a sparse layer of undergrowth. The temperature was cool but not cold, the sun shone brightly through the canopy overhead, and not even the prospect of werewolves could stop me from enjoying such a perfect fall day.

I asked Yi what kind of trees we were walking under.

“Beech,” she said, sounding disappointed but not surprised at my ignorance, and without prompting launched into an explanation of forest management in Epping Forest. Which seemed to largely revolve around pollarding, the practice of cutting back trees so they produce new growth of even thickness for cutting.

“After the Epping Forest Act of 1878 harvest ceased and pollarded trees were allowed to grow unchecked,” she said, “to the point that they could no longer support the weight of their own branches. This results in an abundance of dead wood, which is good for fungi, but also in a closed canopy, which is bad for understory plants.”

I had the feeling this was a speech she gave often. I also had the feeling she and Zuberi were curious about what the heck I was doing here, but neither was bold enough to come out and ask and I wasn’t going to volunteer anything about “weird stuff” until I knew how much Paget wanted me to volunteer. We turned right at a junction and found ourselves surrounded on forest on both sides. It was cooler under the trees, the sunlight muted. After another two hundred meters or so along the packed-dirt path I caught the distinct flash of police tape ahead.

DCI Paget was waiting for us beside the trail. She was a dark-haired white woman with the kind of handsome face that ought to go with a figure of statuesque proportions but was in her case was paired with petite, plump body. She greeted me and shook my hand with more politeness than I was used to from officers who felt compelled to call on the Folly’s expertise.

“Sorry about your weekend,” she said. “But I want you to have a look at this.”

“This” was about twenty meters west of where we stood but clearly visible from the path despite that, there being little undergrowth due to the overgrown trees, remember. From a distance it looked a little like someone sleeping on the ground, though it could just as easily have been mistaken for a pile of rubbish.

“A jogger noticed it this morning when her dog started acting strangely,” Paget explained as she led me over. We took a circuitous route, circling around the little heap so we came at it from the far side. “Said she thought it was a body at first.”

Epping Forest being infamous for body dumps, though Paget insisted it didn’t happen as often as the media would lead you to believe. The jogger investigated, much to her dog’s dismay, and quickly realized it wasn’t a body, dead or alive. But, like the upstanding citizen, she was—her words, not Paget’s—she called the Forest Keepers anyway, fly tipping being a major concern in the forest. Since Yi was already in the area she biked over, mountain bikes apparently one of the Forest Keepers’ preferred means of covering ground, and saw that, far from being a random pile of rubbish, the pile of discarded clothes matched the description of those last seen on Lynn Macey. That’s when Paget’s Saturday morning was derailed, several hours earlier than my own. A couple of forensics types had already come and gone, but Paget had insisted the clothing remain in place until I could arrive.

“Here are the footprints leading in,” Paget said, pointing at the ground. To my Londoner’s eye it just looked like a thick layer of dead leaves, churned up by the boots of the coppers and forensic team who had already been over the scene. I said as much, and she assured me the footprints had been preliminarily matched to the victim’s shoes—final confirmation awaited a lab comparison of the shoes and casts taken from the scene.

“She probably came in from the golf course,” Paget said, gesturing to the east, away from the trail I came in on. I looked and could make out an open space on through the trees. “Macey’s house is just on the other side. Cutting across the fairway would be the fastest way to reach this spot on foot.”

I picked my way carefully across the disturbed ground toward the pile of clothing, trying not to step on the invisible footprints. I meant to crouch down for a closer look but as I bent forward a wave of _vestigia_ hit me so hard I actually lost my balance and wound up on my knees in the dirt. Clean fur, the sensation of running flat out but effortlessly, snow and pine pitch, the copper tang of blood on my tongue, and underneath is all an overwhelming _need_ , like hunger or thirst but nothing to do with food or water.

“Constable Grant?” Paget stood behind me, her voice concerned, uncertain. 

I shook my head, trying to clear away the sensations. The taste of blood was so strong I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, convinced I must have bitten myself. But there was no wound, just one of the strongest _vestigium_ I had ever encountered. 

“You said she was a widow,” I said, to cover my shakiness. “What happened to her husband?”

“Phillip Macey. Died in a car accident two years ago.”

I was getting my breath back and pulled a pair of gloves out of my pocket. “And her kids?”

“There’s two of them. Aiden is fifteen, Katherine’s eight. They’re staying with their uncle and his family in Waltham Abbey—father’s side,” Paget added, before I could ask.

I slipped into the gloves and started going through the clothes. A pair of practical walking shoes, well broken in but not worn. Only one sock. Blue jeans, one leg pulled inside-out. The knickers were about a meter away, torn to shreds. A flannel shirt, both arms torn at the shoulders, half the buttons missing. The bra, remarkably undamaged and still clasped in the back. The leaves and dirt around the area were badly disturbed, as though by a violent struggle.

There was no blood anywhere. I mentioned that and Paget told me one of the only things they had bagged from the scene was a pair of earrings, bloodied as though they’d been torn out of Macey’s ears. Her cell phone had also gone to the lab, which would have been my next question.

“Where’s the paw prints?” I asked.

Paget showed me. Most of the trail I couldn’t make heads or tails of, but there was one, on a patch of bare ground, that even I could see was a print made by some kind of large dog. Very large.

“Well?” Paget demanded, after I’d stared at the print in shock for a few moments. “Is this your shout?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “This is weird stuff, all right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't speak German. Google tells me that the plural of "werewolf" is werwölfe but, like Peter, we all know how reliable internet translations are. If you know what "werewolves" is in German, I'd love to know!


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Paget's story is loosely borrowed from _Seven Tears into the Sea_ by Terri Farley.

Wolf mother, where you been?  
You look so worn, so thin.  
\- “Wolf,” First Aid Kit

## Part Two

Me and Paget walked back to the parking lot while Zuberi finished bagging up the scene. I asked her why she’d been so quick to call the Folly.

“Usually other branches stay as far away from us as they can get,” I pointed out.

She gave me a long, considering look out of the corner of her eye and countered with a question of her own. “You called it ‘weird stuff.’ What does that mean, exactly?”

I could tell the “perfectly rational explanation” flannel I’d used on Dominic wasn’t going to cut it with her. “It means magic is real.”

She thought about that for a minute. “Aliens?”

I sighed. “No. No aliens.”

Paget laughed. “I bet you get that a lot.” The laughter faded slowly from her face. “I grew up in West Lulworth, in Dorset,” she said. “When I was a kid, I would go down to the beach at night, watch the waves. One night I saw… I saw a man walk into the water. He wasn’t swimming or anything. He just walked into the breakers and never came out again. My parents thought…” She shook her head once, sharply. “Anyway, they told me never to tell anyone. And I never have. Until now.”

I wondered what she’d seen that night. Probably not a River, not in salt water. Nightingale had hinted at mermaids once, but it could have been anything, really. The number of things I didn’t know about magic frustrated the hell out of me sometimes.

We reached parking lot and Paget stopped and looked me in the eye. “Constable, is Lynn Macey a werewolf?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

* * *

I asked if I could have a look round Lynn Macey’s house and Paget said she’d meet me over there to unlock it and show me around. This was a suspicious amount of attention for a DCI to give a PC and I wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted to know more about magic or just didn’t want me fraternizing with her officers. Either way there was no point in me saying anything about it so I climbed back into the Asbo, got the satnav going, and started backtracking to Theydon Bois. I called Nightingale as I pulled out of the lot and put him on speakerphone so I could talk while I drove.

“This is definitely one of ours,” I said, and described the _vestigium_ I’d sensed on Macey’s clothes and the lack of blood. “I can see why Paget thought werewolf. She probably caught some of the _vestigium_ , it was that strong.”

“What do you think happened?” Nightingale asked.

“I have no idea,” I admitted. “There were definitely wolf-like prints, but I can’t tell if she actually turned into a wolf. Something could have carried her off, or attacked her. Even if she did transform there’s no way to tell if she did it on purpose or if was done to her.” I was thinking of the Faceless Man’s chimeras. “Werewolf seems as good a working theory as any, but I don’t want to make assumptions.”

“An excellent policy,” Nightingale said. “I shall check the library for any references more enlightening than Wolfe’s _Exotica._ ”

As the crow flies, Macey’s house was less than a kilometer from where her clothes were found, but I had to drive all the way back to the village center and then turn into a neighborhood of mock-Tudor semis with lots of BMWs and Audis in the driveways. The place I was looking for was tucked into a corner where the road made a bend, almost hidden behind the two larger houses on either side. It was small, single-storey detached cottage with diamond-pane windows and blue-glazed terracotta planters lining the walk up to the front door. The planters were empty of anything except bare dirt and the front yard was tidy but barren-looking, especially compared to the careful landscaping of the neighbors. Despite this apparent horticultural apathy I could see a conservatory peeking around the side of the house.

Paget was just getting out of her car when I parked on the street. There was another car in the driveway, a newish Volkswagon.

“Is this Macey’s car?” I asked.

Paget said that it was, and both sets of keys had been found inside the house. Obviously Macey hadn’t driven to Epping Forest. The front door was closed and symbolically barred with a strip of police tape. Paget unlocked it and lifted the tape for me.

The house was laid out in a T-shape, the entryway opening up into a living room, dining room and kitchen to the right, smaller bedroom to the left, second and master bedrooms in the back. The furniture was nice, not matching but it all went well together. There was a coffee table that actually had coffee table books on it, of the art photography kind, though not many books otherwise. There was a fine layer of fingerprint dust on everything.

A large-screen TV was mounted on one wall with a DVD player, X-Box, and Playstation on shelves underneath, along with a couple of controllers and a scattering of games and discs in their cases. The rest of the walls were mostly taken up by large photographic prints, all of them nature shots: fall leaves in a puddle, a crow looking over its shoulder, a country lane wreathed in fog. One showed a forest awfully similar to the one I’d just been in.

“She’s a photographer?” I asked.

“These are all hers,” Paget said. “She does freelance work.”

I wondered how much a freelance photographer made and whether it was enough to support two kids, a nice house, and a good car. Paget grinned.

“I asked the same thing, but she owns the house. Paid for it with the sale of her husband’s business after he died. He ran a local chain of hardware stores,” she added, before I could ask.

I pulled on a second pair of gloves and started poking around. For a house with two kids it was pretty clean, though not professionally so. I guessed Macey did her own housework. There was nothing unusual in the living room, aside from a few gardening books that seemed out of place with the plain front yard. I checked the computer, which wasn’t password-protected, and spent a couple of minutes looking through her files. I didn’t know enough to really search a computer properly and I’d need a tech guy to find hidden or deleted files, but a quick glance showed a lot of innocuous emails and a lot of photographs and photo-editing programs. The photographs were sorted into folders by client, mostly weddings and newborn babies, with a lot more that seemed to be Macey’s personal work—more nature shots.

I moved into the dining room and kitchen and turned up a blank there, too. There was a menu for the week scribbled on a piece of paper and stuck to the fridge with an apple-shaped magnet. Saturday night was spaghetti and meatballs.

“What time did she go missing on Thursday?”

“We’re still working that out.” It turned out Macey was in the habit of going for nighttime walks in Epping Forest, which was technically illegal, and sometimes stayed out all night. I asked what she was doing out there, but apparently no one knew. Having done a bit of nocturnal forest-wandering myself I couldn’t understand why someone would voluntarily spend time in the woods at night when they could be in a pub or even their own comfortable bed instead, but I suppose it takes all types.

Whatever it was she got up to in the forest, she was almost always home in time to get her kids ready for school in the morning. “But not Friday morning,” Paget said. “It wasn’t the first time, though, so they didn’t panic until they got back from school Friday afternoon and found she was still gone.” 

At which point Aiden, the teen, called his uncle, who came over, assessed the situation, and called the police.

“To be honest,” Paget said, “We thought at first she might have gone somewhere in the forest to commit suicide.” Since the car was still in the driveway and there was no indication Macey had taken anything with her it seemed unlikely she had simply run away with a secret boyfriend. Preliminary interviews with Aiden and Katherine suggested Macey’s behavior had been unusual over the past couple of weeks, and a quick check of her medicine cabinet had turned up a prescription bottle of antidepressants. But that theory went out the window when they found her discarded clothes.

I checked the kids’ rooms next, though I didn’t expect to find much. Katherine’s room had a lot of little-girl pink, but when I looked closer I saw that all the dolls and ponies were tucked away on shelves or in baskets, while scattered around in a way indicative of frequent use was an impressive collection of Legos. Aiden’s room indicated he had largely outgrown the toy stage, though there were a few worn stuffed animals that probably had sentimental value. He had a couple of bookcases crammed with books, mostly running toward sci-fi, with some fantasy thrown in. I spotted the complete Harry Potter series, well-worn, alongside a creased paperback copy of Frank Herbert’s _Dune_. There was no sign of cell phones or laptops, but the kids had probably taken those with them to their uncle’s house.

Paget leaned against the doorway, watching me. “What are you looking for, exactly?” she asked.

Usually the SIO on any case I was involved in wanted to know as little about what I was doing at possible. Her interest wasn’t unwelcome, just surprising. Actually, it was kind of nice to feel like I was actually working with her, as part of her team, instead of some kind leper.

“I’m checking for signs anyone in the house is a practitioner—someone who does magic,” I explained.

“Anything so far?”

“Nothing yet.” 

I moved into the master bedroom. Again, few books but lots of photos on the walls. The closet was tidy, a modest number of shoes lined up on the floor. There were several pairs of running shoes and a lot of athletic clothes hanging up, and I guessed Macey was an avid jogger, which Paget confirmed. There were no men’s clothes in the closet, which wasn’t too surprising since the husband had died two years ago, but his stuff had been cleared so thoroughly from the house that if no one had told me about him I would never have guessed there had ever been a husband.

That thought made me backtrack to Aiden’s room. On his desk, half-hidden behind the desktop lamp, was a framed photograph in an easel frame. I picked it up to see it better. It was a family photo, but not one of those studio ones where everyone looks stiff and posed. It had been taken beside a lake in late spring. Everything looked bright and green and I could see ducks on the water in the background. A little girl with her hair in plaits and an older boy grinned up at the camera from either side of a good-looking white man in his early thirties with an arm slung around each of the kids’ shoulders. I guessed this was Katherine, Aiden, and Phillip Macey. They all looked breathless and happy, like they’d been running or playing and then caught by surprise by the camera. It was the only picture of the family I’d seen anywhere in the house.

“Find something?” Paget asked.

“Maybe. Do you have a picture of Macey?”

She said she’d send it to me and I went outside to check the conservatory and the garden. I could tell the garden had once been beautifully landscaped, but although the lawn was trimmed and the beds weeded it had an air of neglect. The conservatory was a mess, pots everywhere and a bag of potting soil half-spilled on the pavers that no one had bothered to sweep up. All the plants were dead, brown skeletons protruding from their pots, and there were spiderwebs everywhere. I guessed no one had been in here for a couple of years. 

I went back to the garden and peered over the rear fence. On the other side was the golf course, then the road, and past that the edge of Epping Forest. It wasn’t far. I could easily see a fit, athletic woman like Macey climbing the fence and cutting across the fairway to reach the forest. I looked around and, sure enough, there were two more blue-glazed pots, turned upside-down to serve as steps, one on either side of the fence.

I had a middle-aged woman with depression who liked running, enjoyed walking in the woods at night, and would rather take pictures of trees than her own children. There was no sign anyone in the family was practitioner and even the vestigia was exactly what I’d expect from a house of that age. It didn’t exactly add up to _werewolf_. The problem was, it didn’t seem to add up to anything else, either.

* * *

With Paget’s blessing, I drove over to Waltham Abbey to talk to Macey’s family. She had two sisters, but neither was close—one in York and the other, ironically, in New York. Both parents were deceased—natural causes, I checked—but her brother-in-law was a mere fifteen minutes away.

Michael and Noelle Addison—Macey, it turned out, was Lynn’s maiden name—lived in a row of 1950s semi-detached council houses around the back of a Tesco Superstore. There were no BMWs or Audis in the driveways here, but it wasn’t a bad neighborhood. Before I got out of the car I checked my mobile and found the promised picture of Macey waiting for me. It was obviously taken from her driver’s license and showed a pretty if unremarkable white woman with dirty blond hair. I squinted at the photo and decided her eyes were blue, or maybe gray, but definitely not hazel.

I knocked on the front door and it was answered by a fair-skinned woman with short, tousled brown hair who looked all of sixteen and whose head barely reached my chin. I wondered for a moment if this was Noelle Addison, but she gave me practiced once-over and I knew she was a copper.

“You must be Constable Grant. DCI Paget told me you were on your way,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “DS Annette Kim. I’m FLO on this case.”

I think I did a good job of hiding my surprise that someone this young was a DS. Maybe she was older than she looked. Well, she’d have to be or they wouldn’t have let her into Hendon. I shook her hand and she led me into the house.

Through the cramped entryway was a living room, furnished in a shabby but comfortable sort of way. A couple of pillows and a duvet showed someone was using the couch as a bed, and an open suitcase in one corner was surrounded by a small explosion of clothes, charging cables, and other possessions. A teenage boy, recognizable as an older version of the boy in the photograph I’d seen in the Macey home, sat on the floor in front of a TV, playing the new Diablo game on a PlayStation. He spared us one quick glance and then turned back to the screen.

“This is Aiden Macey,” Kim said. “Aiden, this is Constable Peter Grant. He’s a specialist from London here to help find your mum.”

This earned me a second glance. “Yeah?” he said. “What d’you specialize in?”

“Unusual cases,” I said.

Aiden looked unimpressed. “Yeah, okay. Nice to meet you, I guess.”

I was astonished by this display of good manners from someone under twenty years of age, though from her expression Kim wasn’t. Perhaps she higher expectations of teenage boys. Having been a teenage boy, I knew better. 

Kim ushered me into the kitchen-stroke-dining room where Michael Addison, heavyset white man with a receding hairline, sat at the scarred kitchen table nursing a cup of tea and checking messages on his phone. He stood when we walked in and shook my hand when Kim introduced us.

“I’m afraid my wife’s not here right now,” he said apologetically. “She’s at the shops with Lucy—our daughter.” He seemed uncertain about what to do next. I suspected his wife did most of the heavy lifting when they had guests.

I decided to put him out of his misery. “Mind if I have a seat?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said, as though that had never occurred to him. “Of course. Tea?”

“Thanks,” I said, and sat opposite his place. Kim leaned against a counter and Addison turned on the kettle. Despite having one less child, the Addison kitchen was significantly messier than the Macey kitchen. There was a strained quality to the house that I suspected was due to having too many people crammed into a too-small space.

“Do you know Lynn Macey well?” I asked.

“Oh, very,” he said. “When Phillip was alive not a week went by that we didn’t all see each other—dinner together, taking the kids to the park. Lucy and Katherine are very close.”

“And after your brother died?”

“She… changed,” Addison said. “She took it very badly. I mean, we all did, of course, but she became very distant. We saw her less often, holidays mostly, and when we did she seemed…” he shrugged. “I don’t know. Distracted, restless.”

The kettle clicked off. Addison hadn’t got bags or mugs ready so he had to scramble to get the tea brewing before the water went cold. The wife was definitely in charge of guests, I thought, watching him.

“Does she have any unusual interests?” I asked. When Addison gave me a puzzled look, I tried to think of something that wouldn’t bias him or make him suspicious. “New Age spirituality, anything like that. Or maybe someone new in her life.” Paget had told me they already checked for a boyfriend and came up blank, but I thought maybe asking the question in a different context might jog something.

Addison considered the question carefully as he brought me and Kim each a cup of tea and topped off his own. It was good, solid builder’s tea, and I got it in a mug with “#1 Dad” on the side and a small chip on the rim. I’d spotted a set of good china cups on the upper shelf of the cabinet when he got the mugs out but I didn’t think he was being rude, just oblivious. But when he answered the question he was surprisingly insightful.

“She’s always been an unusual woman,” he said slowly. “I met her parents a few times before they passed, and they said she was an odd kid. She’d play all day in the woods, not come home until dark. And now she goes out all night.” Addison shook his head, baffled. “She’s a nice woman, very friendly. I’ve always liked her. But I always got the feeling that no matter what she was doing she’d always rather be somewhere else.”

I brought up Macey’s photo on my phone and showed it to him. “Is this photo a good likeness of Lynn Macey?”

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of Lynn before,” he said. “Yeah, this is her. Why?”

“Just making sure it’s a recent photo,” I lied. “Are her eyes right?”

He frowned at that but dutifully squinted at the screen. “Blue? Yeah, she has blue eyes, like Katherine.”

Both of the girls who’d had brushes with the fae in Herefordshire had hazel eyes. While a sample size of two was hardly conclusive, Macey’s unchanged blue eyes seemed to indicate a lack of fae involvement in the case. Which was good because I’d had enough of fairies for a while, but bad because it meant I still had no idea what was going on.

I thanked Addison for his help and asked if I could talk to Aiden and Katherine. He glanced at the doorway to the living room and lowered his voice.

“Katherine’s upstairs,” he said. “She hasn’t been taking it well at all. I’d rather you didn’t upset her, if you didn’t have to. But Aiden seems handling things better.” He hesitated. “We… we haven’t told them what you found this morning. Lynn’s clothes, I mean. We don’t want them to give up hope yet.”

I glanced at Kim and she shrugged, but I couldn’t tell if that meant she agreed with the Addisons’ decision to keep the Macey kids in the dark or just didn’t think it mattered at this stage. Either way, she didn’t seem to have a problem with me talking to them so I went back to the living room and asked Aiden if I could play Diablo with him. 

He gave me the pitying look of every teenager who’s ever been confronted with an adult attempting to be “cool,” but I had never been cool and wasn’t trying to start now so I decided it didn’t apply to me.

“I don’t have the new one yet,” I said. “I hear it has PvP mode.”

Aiden shrugged apathetically. “Yeah, okay.” He handed me a controller and I sat next to him on the floor.

I would like to say that I let him win as part of an advanced interrogation strategy designed to obtain optimal results from an uncooperative witness but the truth is he kicked my arse. Twice. On the bright side, he seemed to warm up to me a bit after that, so when he proposed a third round I asked him if he had any idea what happened to his mum.

He ran his hands restlessly over the controls without really touching them and didn’t look at me. I thought he probably wasn’t taking it better than his sister, just better at hiding it.

“I dunno,” he said, which I recognized as a stalling tactic. Then he countered with a question of his own. “D’you think this is an ‘unusual case?’”

He’d been paying more attention than I thought, to remember my exact words. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

Aiden finally looked directly at me. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of blue but very fierce. “Why?” he demanded.

He wanted his mum’s disappearance to be special, because if it was special it might be different, and if it was different it might end differently than so many disappearances—body found in forest, body found in river, body found in car. I knew Macey’s disappearance was both special and different, but I didn’t know if that was good for her chances or not. I wanted to tell him about this morning’s find. He was fifteen, not a child anymore, and I thought he deserved to know the truth. But it wasn’t my call.

“I’ve never seen a case quite like your mum’s,” I said. “And I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff.”

He didn’t ask if I thought we’d find her. It had been practically the first thing Joanne Marstowe asked me, when we were looking for her daughter. I waited while he looked down at the controller in his lap for a minute, and he finally said, as though the words were torn out of him, “I think she left.”

“You think she left home Thursday night on her own?” I asked, to clarify.

Aiden looked like he regretting speaking. “No,” he said, “I think she ran away from home. She left… us.”

“What makes you think that?”

“She wasn’t happy here,” he said. “Not after Dad died. Maybe not even before that.”

There was something else, but he wasn’t going to tell me and I didn’t think playing more video games together was going to change that. I handed him one of my cards.

“Call me if you think of anything, or need anything,” I said. “Even if it seems weird.”

He didn’t say anything, but he did take the card.


	3. Part III

Rain falls down my cheek…  
I wish I knew better than I know now.

As the darkness fills my soul…  
As the wolf comes running and running…  
\- “Wolf,” Tailor

## Part Three

I woke early on Sunday morning and came downstairs to find the breakfast room already laid out and Nightingale at the table in his herringbone tweed suit, the one with the leather patches at the elbows, a coat draped over the back of his chair and his driving gloves on the table next to him.

“Going somewhere?” I asked.

“I thought I might join you in Theydon Bois today,” Nightingale said.

I wondered if he didn’t trust me on my own after the mess I’d made in Herefordshire, but there’s no polite way to ask your boss something like that so I loaded up a plate and tucked in. “Did you find anything useful in the library yesterday?” I asked instead.

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I found numerous accounts from the Continent, particularly France and Germany. However, most of those accused of being werewolves were generally tried and executed by local authorities before a practitioner was able to interview the suspect.”

Making it impossible to know whether they were actually werewolves, experiencing a perfectly ordinary and non-magical case of mental illness, or just unpopular with their neighbors. It turned out werewolf trials were a part of the larger witch-hunting hysteria of the seventeenth century.

“In fact, many suspected werewolves were also accused of being witches, or gaining their power to change shape from bargains made with the Devil,” Nightingale said.

“Well, unless there’s something you haven’t been telling me,” I said, “real magic doesn’t have anything to do with Satanic worship.”

“Quite,” Nightingale said. “It does rather seem unlikely that those poor people were anything other than victims of superstition. However, I did find two confirmed cases involving true magic.”

Neither of which helped us, because one involved a spell used to control wolves, which I hadn’t even known was possible, and while the other definitely involved a human turning into a wolf, the practitioner recording the case had no idea how it was done. Which put us back at square one.

At this depressing juncture, my phone rang. Nightingale has a strict no-devices-at-the-table rule, so I stepped out onto the balcony to answer it. To my surprise, it was Aiden Macey.

“You said to call,” he said. “Even if it was weird.”

I agreed that I had said that and asked him what I could do for him.

“Something happened last night,” he said. “Something weird.”

He wouldn’t tell me what had happened over the phone and didn’t want to talk to the local police, so I told him I would see him in an hour. Then I called Paget to give her a heads-up and went to tell Nightingale that we might have a lead.

“Excellent,” he said, and picked up his gloves.

On the drive out to Theydon Bois I filled him in on yesterday’s events, since I’d made it back to the Folly too late last night to give him the rundown. He drove in thoughtful silence while I talked.

“And there was no indication anyone in the Addison household is a practitioner?” he asked when I’d finished.

“None whatsoever,” I said. “You think someone used a spell to transform her?”

“It seems unlikely,” Nightingale admitted. “However, none of the alternatives seem more likely.”

“Is there a spell that could do that? Change someone else, or yourself?”

“Not that I know of,” Nightingale said slowly. “ _Dissimulo_ can produce minor alterations in the practitioner’s appearance, but nothing so dramatic as exchanging two legs for four.”

I knew we were both thinking of the Faceless Man and his chimeras, but I didn’t want to be the first person to say it out loud. “We don’t even know she actually turned into a wolf,” I offered. “You know, they make boots with treads shaped like paws, so you leave wolf prints when you walk. She could have put on a pair of those.”

I could tell Nightingale didn’t believe me but was too polite to call me a liar. I grinned and said, “I’ll show you a picture sometime.”

Traffic was light and it was still early when we reached the Addison house. Waltham Abbey was quiet and the streets nearly deserted. Despite the name, the town either wasn’t much for churchgoing or its residents liked to sleep in and go to the late mass. Nightingale parked the Jag at the base of the driveway and we hurried up the short walk to the front door—yesterday’s clear weather had passed and the weather was gray. It had rained overnight and threatening to start again soon.

Aiden must have been watching for us from the living room window because he opened the front door before I could knock, already dressed despite the early hour in blue jeans and a hoodie with the name of a band I didn’t recognize on the front. His eyes went straight to Nightingale, standing beside me in his immaculate suit, vintage coat, and handmade shoes, and he actually took a step back.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Inspector Thomas Nightingale,” Nightingale said, and offered Aiden his hand.

Of course, Nightingale’s a DCI, not a DI, but I think he saw Aiden was already a little intimidated and tacking on a few extra titles would probably not improve the situation. Aiden took his hand automatically and then seemed surprised to find himself in the middle of a handshake.

“Aiden?” a woman called from inside the house. “Who is it?”

Aiden threw a nervous look over his shoulder and I got the feeling he hadn’t told anyone we were coming.

“I had hoped to speak with your aunt and uncle,” Nightingale said. “May I come in?”

“I… sure,” Aiden said. He moved aside and Nightingale slipped into the house just as a stout white woman with a harried expression appeared in the entryway behind him.

Nightingale let his momentum carry them both into the living room, and I heard him say, “I apologize for calling on you so early, Mrs. Addison…” before they were both out sight, leaving me and Aiden alone in the doorway. Nightingale can get away with stuff like that. It’s the posh accent and swanky clothes.

Aiden stepped outside and closed the door firmly behind him, and then just stood on the front step, staring at me. He reminded me of how nonplussed his uncle had been yesterday when confronted with guests. I thought of the handsome man in the photograph and wondered if Aiden’s father had been like this, too. 

“Why don’t we sit down,” I suggested. There was a faded wooden bench in the tiny front yard, and after we’d both taken a seat I asked him why he’d called me.

“I saw my mum last night,” Aiden said. “And the night before, too.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting. “She came here to your uncle’s house?” I asked. “Or did you meet her somewhere?”

“She came here,” he said. “I heard her tapping on the living room window. There’s not enough room here, so I’m sleeping on the sofa and Kathy’s sharing Lucy’s room. That’s why it woke me up.”

“Did she come inside the house?”

“No, she wouldn’t come in. So I woke Kathy up and we went outside to talk to her.”

The first thing I thought of was vampires, which, in the old stories, couldn’t come inside unless invited and often visited—and attacked—their living relatives first. But although real vampires did usually kill their families first, it was more a matter of convenience than anything else, and as far as I know they didn’t have any trouble entering buildings. Plus, I hadn’t picked up any _tactus disvitae_ anywhere.

I asked Aiden what they talked about.

“She wanted to tell us she was okay, that she hadn’t been kidnapped or anything. She said she loved us but she couldn’t stay.” His voice cracked on the word loved. “And then she left.”

“Did she say why she couldn’t stay?”

He shook his head mutely. I didn’t want to press him, but I had to. At least Hannah and Nicole’s parents had been exactly that—parents, adults. It was harder to push Aiden for uncomfortable details. “Did she say where she’s been for the past two days? Did you see how she arrived, how she left? What she was wearing?”

Aiden blushed a little. “She… she wasn’t wearing anything. I think she walked, because her feet were really dirty. Her hands, too. She didn’t have shoes on or anything.” He looked up at me. “Do you think she might be hiding in the forest?”

I used a classic copper’s trick and turned the question back on him. “The Epping Forest? What makes you think she would be there?”

“I dunno,” he said, but I think it was only a reflex because then he said, “Mum likes the forest. She goes there when she’s upset.”

“Did she seem upset either night?”

“No,” Aiden said. “She just seemed sad.”

He went back inside after that, and after a little while Nightingale came out and found me crouched in front of the living room window.

“Find something?” he asked.

I pointed to the soft, damp earth under the sill, where someone with small, bare feet had clearly stood recently. I repeated Aiden’s story and said, “We need to get some forensics people out here.”

Nightingale squatted comfortably on his heels to examine the prints. “Indeed,” he said. As I backed away to make the call, he leaned forward carefully to bring his face close to the ground—checking for _vestigia_.

“Nothing,” he said, rejoining me as I slid my mobile back in my pocket. “No trace of the uncanny at all.”

“I have a hypothesis about that, sir.”

“Yes?”

“In the forest, the _vestigium_ was focused around the spot where Macey transformed, or whatever it was she did. If she changed somewhere else and walked to this spot, then the _vestigium_ wouldn’t be here, it would be there.”

“Which could be anywhere,” Nightingale said.

“I don’t think so. A naked woman walking around at night is a lot more conspicuous than, say, a wolf, which someone might mistake for a big dog. I think she came here from the forest as a wolf, and then turned back into a human somewhere close by—probably in the Addisons’ garden.”

“You’re assuming Macey is transforming, and that her transformations are both voluntary and controlled.”

“We have to start somewhere,” I pointed out. “And anyway, it’s easy enough to check.”

The back garden was long and narrow, with a patchy lawn, a few scraggly shrubs, and large, spreading tree against the back fence that even I could recognize as a maple. There was pool, too, not an in-ground one but not a kiddie pool, either, already drained and covered for winter. Nightingale took one half and I took the other, and we both walked a methodical search grid from one end of the yard to the other. I was just beginning to think my hypothesis was wrong when I found a scuffed patch of dirt in the back corner under the maple tree.

“Over here, sir!”

Nightingale came over but pulled up short when he caught the _vestigium_. “Good Lord,” he said. “That’s… unexpected.” He took the last few steps and joined me in staring down at the disturbed ground. “Is it the same _vestigium_ as you sensed in the forest?”

It was. Fur and frost, pine and blood, running and needing. It was, if anything, even stronger than what I had felt on Macey’s clothes, probably because it was fresher. After a brief and fruitless search for anything resembling a wolf print, we retreated to the Jag to avoid further contaminating the evidence and drawing the ire of the forensics team.

“Well, so far your theory stands,” Nightingale said.

“Hypothesis,” I corrected.

“Very well, your hypothesis. Where does that leave us?”

“She’s probably hiding out in the Epping Forest,” I said. “We just have to find her.”

“Easier said than done. DCI Paget has search teams combing the forest now, without much success.”

“Yeah, but they’re looking for a woman aren’t they? Not a wolf.”

“That only makes things more difficult, not less,” Nightingale pointed out. “An animal is significantly harder to locate in a forest than a human.”

We both thought about that for a minute.

“How do you hunt wolves, anyway?” I wondered. “People must have done it all the time, since there aren’t any around anymore.”

“I believe the last wolf in England was killed sometime in the fourteenth century,” Nightingale said. “Somewhat later in Scotland. Dogs were the preferred method, though snares were also used.”

“They’ve already tried using search and rescue dogs,” I said. “They won’t follow the trail, probably because they can sense the vestigium. And I don’t think the Forest Keepers would let us use traps, either. Too much chance of people’s pets getting caught.” Which put us back at square one. Again.

At this optimistic juncture DCI Paget showed up in a silver Sprinter with a handful of forensic types and we climbed out of the Jag to give her the news. I introduced her to Nightingale and while the two of them engaged in a little polite territory marking I sloped off to show the crime scene people what we’d found. When I got back I found them discussing the case.

“Is Lynn Macey actually turning into a wolf?” Paget wanted to know.

Nightingale gave me a look which I interpreted as _How much did you tell her and why did you tell her so much?_ I shrugged and tried to look innocent.

“We lack sufficient information to do more than speculate,” Nightingale said evasively.

Paget crossed her arms. “Meaning you have no idea what’s happening but you think she’s actually turning into a wolf.”

“More or less, yes,” Nightingale admitted.

I think that, despite everything, she still half-expected there to be some normal, non-magical explanation for this. She blinked at Nightingale and said, “Well, shit. A werewolf. Is she a danger to the public? Is she… contagious?”

“She is almost certainly not contagious,” Nightingale said. “Whether she is dangerous is a more difficult question to answer. Have there been any reports of violence we may attribute to Macey since her disappearance?”

“Feral dog attacks, you mean? No, there’s been nothing like that.”

“Then it would appear she is no ravening beast. Likely she either retains her human intelligence or her mind transforms as well as her body—or perhaps something in between. In either case, she seems unlikely to pose a threat. Lynn Macey has no history of violence and wolves, despite the legends, are not generally a danger to humans.”

“Then what, precisely, am I investigating?” Paget demanded. She began ticking points off on her fingers. “Macey’s not dead, and she told her son she wasn’t abducted, so she’s not a victim. On four legs or on two she hasn’t broken any laws that I know of, so she’s not a criminal. She’s not any more likely to commit a crime than she was last week, except maybe poaching a few deer from the Epping Forest—and from what Yi tells me that wouldn’t be so bad—so she’s not a threat to the peace. As long as she doesn’t eat anyone’s cattle, there’s no crime here.”

“There’s her kids,” I said. “She left them without arranging for their care. That’s child abandonment.”

Nightingale looked at me sharply. “At any rate,” he said, “we cannot know for certain her transformation is entirely voluntary until we interview her. Until then, we must entertain the possibility she is being coerced or controlled, or even mentally ill.”

“I take your point,” Paget said. “Well then, how do we find her?”

“I have a plan,” I said. They both gave me horrified looks, which was completely unfair because Paget had only met me yesterday. I explained my plan and their expressions didn’t change.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s not bad plan.”

“It’s not a good plan, either,” Nightingale said. “Though to be fair, you’ve had worse.” He paused, considering, and added, “Much worse.”


	4. Part IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end, folks! Please remember to leave a review if you're so inclined :)

When I die, let the wolves enjoy my bones.  
When I die, let me go.

Oh, the world is dark and I’ve looked as far as I can see.  
When the years have torn me apart, let me be.  
\- “Wolves,” Down Like Silver

## Part Four

It really wasn’t a bad plan, despite what Nightingale said. It was too simple to be a bad plan—not enough moving parts for it to break. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

Lynn Macey had come to the Addison house the last two nights to see her children, so there was a good chance she would return tonight. All we had to do was stake out the house and wait for her to come to us.

“A wolf’s senses are significantly more acute than a human’s,” Nightingale pointed out. “If we bring in enough people to adequately cover all access points, she’s bound to spot one of them.”

I popped the boot of the Jag and produced with a flourish a bright yellow box with a mobile phone mounted inside. Nightingale and Paget looked at me blankly.

“This,” I said, “is a Wide-Area Magic Detector—WAM-D for short. It stops working when something magical happens, like a human turning into a wolf or vice versa. Meaning we can detect remotely when Macey shows up.”

“And you just happen to carry a supply in the boot of your car?” Paget asked.

“I most certainly do not,” Nightingale muttered.

“I thought they might come in handy,” I said.

Paget wanted to be in on the stakeout but Nightingale insisted we keep the number of people involved to a minimum—meaning me and him. She agreed eventually, though she wasn’t happy about it. I put up my magic detectors and we drove back to the Folly, where I managed to get my lazy Sunday afternoon nap after all. When I woke up I called Beverly and put her on speakerphone while I had a quick wash in the tub—swearing once again that I would install a shower soon—and put on fresh clothes. She indicated that a booty call would make a nice study break, but I regretfully declined. I did ask her about werewolves, but she claimed not to know anything except that rumor about Sweden.

At six I met Nightingale in the atrium and, suitably provisioned with a Sainsbury’s bag of sandwiches and a flask of coffee from Molly, we climbed into the Jag and set out for Waltham Abbey again. The sun was below the horizon but there was still plenty of light when we parked on the Addisons’ street, a few houses down to avoid drawing attention. I unshipped my tablet and cycled through all the detectors—one at each corner of the Addison property and a few more spread throughout the neighborhood—to make sure they were all still working. Nightingale watched the process with bemusement.

“You used these devices at Rushpool, did you not?”

“To track unicorns, yeah.”

“At least we’re unlikely to see any of those tonight.”

God, I hope not, I thought, but I was suddenly remembering that Zachary Palmer once told me he saw a unicorn in Epping Forest. Since the moon was only in the first quarter we wouldn’t even be able to see them, which just made it worse. Invisible carnivorous unicorns, exactly what we needed.

To take my mind off that cheerful thought, I looked up those boots with the paw-shaped treads and showed Nightingale a picture to prove I wasn’t making it up.

“Unbelievable,” he said, scrolling down the page with light flicks of his finger. He’d gotten the hang of touchscreens fast enough after I gave him a smartphone, but he was still hazy on the concept of the internet in general and as far as I knew had yet to google anything, ever. “What possible purpose could these serve?”

“They’d be great for a practical joke,” I suggested. “You could leave giant paw prints all over Dartmoor and make people think it’s haunted by a spectral hound.”

Nightingale gave me a wry look and handed me back my tablet. “An excellent use of one’s time, I’m sure.”

“Come on, sir,” I said. “Surely you must have done a bit of pranking when you were at Ho—Casterbrook.”

He caught my slip but smiled anyway, a mischievous smile that looked good on him. “I confess to perpetrating my fair share of misdemeanors when I was boy. More than my fair share, if you asked some of my masters.”

I tried to imagine Nightingale as a young troublemaker. It was struggle, but with that grin on his face I could just about manage it. I could certainly imagine the kind of trouble I would have gotten into at that age with the handful of spells I knew now—and Nightingale must have known far more, since he’d started learning magic at twelve.

“Did you ever try to run away?” I asked.

“From Casterbrook?” Nightingale gave me a puzzled look. “No, I can’t say I did.”

A lot of people I knew had tried to run away when they were kids. Had Nightingale been so happy there at Casterbrook, with his mates and his magic and his rugby, that he hadn’t wanted to leave? Or had he just thought it through better than I had and realized that since there was nowhere to go there was no point in leaving in the first place?

Nightingale was still watching me. “Why do you ask?”

I shifted my legs in the footwell, trying to find a better position. I love the Jag, but it’s not the most comfortable car. “Aiden Macey thinks his mum ran away. That’s what she told him, and he believes her, and I’m betting he knows her well enough to know if that’s the kind of thing she would do or not. What kind of person would rather live as a wild animal in the forest than stay with the people who love her?”

“I admit, it’s a decision I have difficulty sympathizing with,” Nightingale said, “but many parents find themselves unable to care for their children. Abandonment is, sadly, not uncommon, especially in cases of mental illness.”

“She could have made some kind of arrangement for them,” I argued. “Dropped them off a their uncle’s or something, instead of just leaving. When I ran away I never thought about how my disappearance would affect the people I left behind, but I was a kid and kids are selfish like that. Macey doesn’t have that excuse.”

“I never knew you ran away from home,” Nightingale said.

I shrugged. “I didn’t make it very far. And I came back both times.”

“Macey has also returned twice,” Nightingale pointed out, after a pause. “If she has chosen to leave her children, the choice was clearly not an easy one. And there may be extenuating circumstances. I am given to understand that in cases of child abandonment often no charges are filed for precisely that reason.”

“You seem surprisingly okay with this,” I said.

“If by ‘this’ you mean treating Macey no differently than any other person, regardless of her magical nature,” Nightingale said, “I recall you arguing very persuasively that we treat Simone Fitzwilliam and her sisters in such a manner.”

I didn’t want to talk about this. I said, “It didn’t matter in the end.”

“It mattered to me,” Nightingale said. “It matters to Lynn Macey.”

The conversation faltered after that. It was full dark now and we took turns napping for a while. I woke violently from a really bizarre dream involving being chased by a giant teapot wearing one of Beverly’s jumpers when my tablet began playing the red alert sound from Star Trek. I flailed about clumsily for a moment while Nightingale said a few choice swearwords before I managed to get the alarm shut off.

“Sorry,” I muttered, rubbing grit out of my eyes as I checked the screen. “Northwest corner of the property. Same place she came in last time.”

“Let’s go,” Nightingale said.

We piled out of the Jag, closing the doors as quietly as we could, and jogged toward the Addison house. It was raining, but not proper rain, just that fine mist that feels like nothing until it soaks through your clothes and starts dripping off your nose. The street lights were on, casting hazy pools of yellow light on the pavement. Nightingale indicated that he would go left around the house, the more direct route to where we guessed Macey was, and gestured for me to go right. I nodded to show I understood, but took a moment to peer in the living room window, where I could just make out Aiden’s sleeping form on the couch beneath a pile of blankets. Reassured that everything was quiet inside, I cautiously rounded the corner to the east side of the house and that was why I stumbled across Lynn Macey just as she began the transformation from wolf to human.

As I reconstructed it later, Macey had jumped the fence at the northwest corner of the Addison property, passing close enough that her mere presence caused the magic detector mounted there to malfunction. Still in wolf form, she crossed the back yard and slipped into the eastern side yard just as Nightingale entered the back yard from the western side. Maybe the narrower side yard felt more sheltered than the corner where she had changed last time, or maybe she was just in a hurry and it was faster to cover ground as a wolf than a human. At any rate, I showed up just in time to get hit by the strongest _vestigium_ I’d even encountered.

I was almost two years into my apprenticeship by then and I’d had everyone from the goddess of the River Thames to an eleven-year-old girl try to get inside my head, so I was no stranger to glamors or how to resist them. _Vestigia_ and glamors aren’t the same thing but this one affected me as if it was, and suddenly all my practice was useless. I could feel the _vestigium_ , the brush of snow against my skin, the resinous scent of pine, the metallic taste of blood flooding my mouth, as if it was a _forma_ I was trying to shape in my mind. Both _vestigia_ and _seducere_ can feel a little like that, like they’re something in your mind but not from your mind. This was different. I was trying to make the right shape, I wanted to make the right shape the same way I tried when Nightingale demonstrated a new _forma_ for me, but this was a hundred times easier than anything Nightingale had ever shown me. I could already feel the engine turning over, feel myself getting closer, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds before I got it right and then I would be free from everything, from the pain of Lesley’s betrayal and the fear of the Faceless Man and all the disappointments of my life and I could just run and run and run—

And then what? I wondered. What would I do when I was tired of running, when I got hungry, or cold? What would happen to Nightingale, my family, Beverly, once I was gone? And then I realized that I didn’t want this, not really. It had only been a passing desire—a real desire, my desire, not something someone made me want with magic, but passing all the same. 

With an effort I shut down the half-made spell and found myself on my hands and knees in the dirt in the Addison’s side yard. My face was wet, and I didn’t think it was all from the rain. I was breathing so hard it took me a moment to realize I could hear someone else breathing nearby. I made a werelight and before I even finished lining up the _forma_ I heard the other person gasp and scramble back.

In the off-white glow of my werelight Lynn Macey crouched on the patchy grass. I’d only seen a photo of her face; the rest of her was lean, muscled like a runner and completely naked. Her feet were covered in mud up to the ankle and her hands up to the wrist, and her hair was a tangled nest. Her blue eyes were startled but there was something off about her expression, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I got carefully to my feet and she matched my movements, watching me closely. Her movements were subtly wrong, oddly graceful but like her joints were in the wrong places.

“Lynn Macey?” I asked.

The question seemed to confuse her. “Who are you?” she asked. Her words were slow and a little slurred.

“Constable Peter Grant,” I said. “You’ve been missing for two days, Lynn. Your family is worried, and we’ve been looking for you.”

The confusion rapidly gave way to panic. “No,” she said. “I can’t go back. I have to—I have to—”

She turned to run back the way she’d come but Nightingale chose that moment to appear around the corner of the house. I’d expected him to come running the moment Macey transformed—the _vestigium_ was so strong he must have felt it a mile away—but I wasn’t going to complain about his fashionable arrival. She changed directions instantly, whirling toward me. I had a nice _impello palma_ all lined up but realized at the last moment that if I missed Macey my _impello_ would smack right into Nightingale. It’s hardly a lethal spell and Nightingale probably knew some way to block it, but there was no way I was going to throw spells at my governor. In my moment of hesitation Macey raced past me and headed toward the street.

“Go after her!” Nightingale snapped, but I was already moving. 

She was fast, faster than I expected even from someone who ran for fun, but I had experience chasing Pale Ladies and fleeing from unicorns so even if I couldn’t close the distance between us I was at least able to keep her in sight. We bolted across the street, cut through someone’s garden and over their fence, and burst into an open wide open space dotted with trees and random outcroppings of statuary. After almost running headlong into an obelisk for the second time I made another werelight and saw I was chasing her through a cemetery. Obviously the universe, sadistic bastard that it was, thought that a midnight footchase involving werewolves could only be improved by statues of weeping angels. 

On the open ground she quickly outdistanced me and I was just wondering if I should try another _impello_ when she caught her foot on one of those little stone fences they put around graves so you can’t actually walk over the dead people. She screamed and tumbled to the ground. At the speed she was going, and barefoot, I thought she must have broken a toe at least.

I caught up to her just as she scrambled back to her feet and hit her with a flying tackle that sent us both sprawling. She was supposed to land underneath me but she twisted somehow and we hit side-by-side and skidded across the grass. My shoulder smashed into another one of those stupid fences and my entire right arm went numb. I suppose I should have been grateful it wasn’t my head, but all I could think was that if she got away from me now I didn’t think I had the stamina to run her down again, so as she wriggled out of my weakened grip I made a wild grab with my left hand and managed to catch hold of her forearm, jerking her back to her knees. She could have punched me or kicked me, or even tried to pull away. I was expecting that. Instead she lunged forward and sank her teeth into my wrist.

Despite being omnivores, the human jaw packs a pretty strong bite, and you don’t need sharp teeth to break skin. Pain stabbed up my arm and I may have screamed, I don’t remember. My fingers slackened without any input from my brain and she almost pulled free, but I somehow hung on. Fighting the pain in one wrist and the pain in the other shoulder, I managed to get her on the ground with both hands behind her back. She kept twisting and struggling but when I finally got the cuffs on the fight seemed to go out of her and she slumped over, defeated.

I pushed to my feet just as Nightingale caught up with us. “Well done, Peter,” he said, eying Macey, who huddled silently at my feet. He saw me cradling my wrist against my chest and said, “Are you hurt?”

“It’s not bad,” I said, not sure if that was true or not. My werelight had gone out when I tackled Macey but Nightingale had brought his own and I held out my hand to examine it in the bright, warm light. There were two clear crescent-shaped lines of red on either side of my wrist, looking like raw meat, and I thought I caught a white glimpse of bone. Blood was soaking into the sleeve of my shirt and running down my hand. The wound gave a sudden, painful throb and the edges of my vision darkened.

Nightingale was suddenly at my elbow, wrapping a one of his crisply-pressed handkerchiefs around my wrist. “Hold this,” he said. “Tightly.”

I did what he said and it didn’t hurt less but it helped to have something to do. It probably really wasn’t all that bad, just bleeding a lot.

“Will you be alright?” Nightingale asked.

I thought I would be just dandy after some heavy-duty painkillers and maybe some stitches, but in the short term I could cope. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Good show,” Nightingale said. He stepped away from me and indicated with a brief gesture and an expressive flick of his eyebrow that he would cover Macey while I did the talking. 

With a grimace I crouched down in front of Macey, just out of easy lunging distance, and said, “Lynn, can you hear me?”

She lifted her head and stared at me. If pressed, I would have identified the expression on her face as wary, but it didn’t quite seem to match any emotion I’d seen before. It reminded me of the foxes I’d see occasionally while patrolling, which would look at you with some kind of recognizable intelligence in their eyes, not human or even doggy intelligence, but something wilder and more incomprehensible.

“Of course I can hear you,” she said. Her words were clearer than before.

By all rights we should have arrested her and taken in her in to the station house for an interview. We had to, really, after she’d bit me, but I was pretty sure we wouldn’t get anything coherent out of her if we tried to bring her in and I think Nightingale realized that, too.

“Can you tell us how you came to transform into a wolf?” I asked.

She frowned at me and slowly shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“You spent the past two days in the Epping Forest,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How?” I asked. “Were you sleeping in a tent? It’s getting cold at night, do you have a sleeping bag, some clothes? How did you get food?”

“I… I was a wolf,” Macey said. Something moved behind her eyes, that’s the only way I can think to describe it. I’ve never seen anything like it before and I hope I never see anything like it again because it was really creepy. “I slept on the ground and I ate a rabbit.”

“Have you always been able to become a wolf?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I wish I had been able to. I always wanted to be able to.”

The first time, she told me, was three nights ago, when she went for one of her accustomed nighttime strolls through the Epping Forest. She loved being in the forest at night, running between the trees like she belonged there, a part of the forest rather than a human interloper. She remembered wanting to stay there forever, to be someone else, something else, something that never had to go back to her house and her life. And it had happened.

“How did it happen?” I pressed.

Macey didn’t seem to know or care. It had seemed so natural and right that she hadn’t even questioned it. The next twenty-four hours she spent running through the forest on four legs, apparently happy for the first time in years.

“Not happy,” she corrected herself, picking her words carefully. “Not unhappy, but not happy, either, which was better than being happy.”

I tried to figure out if there had been any kind of trigger event, something that had brought out some kind of latent ability or someone who had done this to her, but it sounded like she really had been alone in the forest and just… spontaneously turned into a wolf. Worse, I could tell I was losing her. The more questions I asked, the more disjointed her answers became. When I first saw her in the Addisons’ yard she had seemed not quite human, like an animal wearing a human skin. As we talked I had seen the humanity returning to her face and words, but now it was slipping away again and I didn’t know how to keep it from disappearing altogether. I glanced at Nightingale, but he was frowning down at her like he had never seen anything like her before and had no idea what to make of her. Which was probably the case.

She started tugging at the handcuffs. “Let me go,” she pleaded. “I need to go back to the forest.”

“What about your kids?” I asked. “They don’t know why you abandoned them. They miss you.”

Macey went still and then, to my surprise, started crying, and not dainty little hiccups either but desperate, gasping sobs. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I love them so much, but I can’t stay in that house anymore. I can’t live that life anymore. I don’t want to leave them but I can’t stay. I’m sorry. I have to go. Please let me go.”

I didn’t want to stay there and watch her cry. I retreated to Nightingale’s side and we both half-turned so we could keep an eye on her without staring at her.

“Now what?” I asked.

Nightingale shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “There seems to be no foul play involved in her transformation. As Paget said, there would appear to be no crime to investigate.”

“The law is pretty clear on this, sir,” I said. “If she is fully cognizant of her actions she should be arrested for child abandonment. If she’s not fully cognizant of her actions she should be hospitalized for mental illness.”

“But?”

I blew out a sigh and hugged my still-throbbing wrist a little closer to my chest. Nightingale’s handkerchief was so thoroughly soaked with blood that I didn’t think even Molly would be able to get it clean again, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. “But… I think confining her in any way would be inhumane. It might even kill her, for all we know.”

Nightingale looked at me and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. We’d had this same argument before, more or less, over Simone and her sisters. Hell, we’d already made all the comparisons earlier this evening. The difference was that last time following the law regardless of magical complications meant sparing lives, and this time it meant destroying them. I couldn’t argue we ignore the law just because Macey wasn’t entirely human. It set a dangerous precedent and, more importantly, it was wrong. But I couldn’t argue we follow the law because that, too, would be wrong.

I stared helplessly back at Nightingale. A small, cowardly part of me wanted him to make the decision for me. That was what superior officers were for, taking responsibility for shitty situations so us grunts didn’t have to. But that was a cop-out, and I knew if I just followed his orders I’d never forgive either of us no matter which way he chose.

Macey, still kneeling on the ground, stared up at me. Her eyes were the same shade of blue as in the photo on her driver’s license, a little red from crying. She turned her head to wipe her running nose on her shoulder and the gesture reminded me of Toby rubbing his paw against his muzzle. I didn’t know what to do.

“Peter,” Nightingale said gently. “I think it would be best if we allowed her to go. Perhaps the law can be flexible, in this instance, for the sake of mercy.”

He was right, and I hated it, but if he’d been wrong I would have hated it, too. I unlocked the handcuffs and slipped them off Macey’s wrists. “We’re not charging you with anything, Lynn,” I said. “You’re free to go.”

She stood up slowly, rubbing her wrists and glancing between me and Nightingale. Her eyes changed first. I could actually see the human consciousness slip away, leaving nothing but a wolf watching me out of a woman’s face.

“Thank you,” she said, but I could tell the words were just noises to her, that she was already forgetting the meaning of speech. I was ready for the _vestigium_ this time and I was able to watch as the transformation swept over her. Her body rippled, that’s the only way I can describe it. Limbs twisted and bent, fur rushed over her skin in a gray wave, a tail stretched out from the base of her spine. In a horrible echo of Punch’s _dissimulo_ her face bulged into a muzzle and then there was no woman left, only a lithe gray wolf watching me with pricked eared through yellow eyes.

A choked gasp made me tear my eyes away from the spectacle of Macey’s change. Nightingale was on the ground, curled around himself and trembling violently. His werelight went out, which was somehow even more alarming because while a good sneeze is sometimes enough to make my concentration slip I’ve never seen Nightingale lose control of a spell before.

I made a werelight of my own and dropped to my knees beside him. I was pretty sure he was just feeling the effects of the _vestigium_ , but even I hadn’t been hit this badly and I would have expected him to handle it better. His eyes were open and wet in the glow of my werelight, but they were unfocused and he didn’t react when I called to him. I touched him cautiously on shoulder and I felt a rush of cold air and the brush of fur against my face, like an echo of the _vestigium that had accompanied Macey’s change. He was caught up in the _vestigium_ the same way I had been, I realized, and, like me, was trying to reproduce it as though it were a _forma_._

__

__

Now that was a frightening thought, because I was pretty sure I knew what would have happened if I’d managed to produce that forma, and I really didn’t want to see it happen to Nightingale. I shook him gently and said “Inspector? Can you hear me?”

He didn’t answer, but a ripple passed through his body, the same kind of ripple that had passed through Macey’s. I may have panicked a little, which explains what I did next. I grabbed him by the lapels of his coat, hauled him up, and backhanded him across the face, probably harder than was strictly necessary. I shouted his name for good measure, his first name, which I’d never used before.

His head snapped back and he grabbed my wrists. His eyes focused on my face but he looked confused and I’m not sure he recognized me. I smothered a gasp when his fingers closed over the bite marks, but I think I must have made some kind of sound anyway because the next thing I knew he let go of me and sprang to his feet. I followed more slowly, pretending not to see as he hastily wiped his eyes and started brushing mud off his clothes.

“What happened to Macey?” he asked.

I looked around, but there was no sign of the wolf she had become. “She must have run off,” I said. 

He nodded distractedly and started walking in the direction of the Addison’s house. I followed, and, after a moment, started describing Macey’s transformation to fill the silence. When I was finished Nightingale shook his head.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” he said. “I can see how the peculiar nature of the _vestigium_ associated with the transformation might give rise to tales of lycanthropy being contagious.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “You felt it as well?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I got it when she transformed the first time, so I was expecting it.” Which still didn’t explain our different reactions, and also raised an interesting question. “You didn’t feel it in the Addisons’ yard?”

“No,” he said, frowning. “The _vestigium_ must be extremely localized.”

There were about half a dozen questions I wanted to ask, number one on the list being how the hell a human could just spontaneously turn into a wolf, but I didn’t think Nightingale would appreciate any of them right now so I did my best to memorize them for later—later probably being about a year from now at the rate I was mastering _formae_. But there was one question I had to ask. 

“What are we going to tell Aiden and Katherine Macey?”

We reached the gate of the cemetery. I’d scrambled over a fence to get in but Nightingale had obviously come this way because there was a neat hole in the gate where the lock should have been.

“Perhaps we should tell them she committed suicide,” Nightingale suggested as he held the gate open for me. “It was, after all, Paget’s first assumption. It may not even incorrect. I believe it’s safe to say that the woman who lived in that house with her husband and children no longer exists.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but she’s not dead, either.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

I thought about it as we walked toward the Addisons’ street. The streetlights cast pools of yellow light on the pavement and I killed my werelight so I wouldn’t destroy any innocent electronics we might pass. “We could tell them she ran away,” I said. “That’s what Aiden believes already. And it’s not wrong.”

“That’s hardly a kinder story than suicide,” Nightingale said. “Perhaps worse, in some ways.”

I didn’t see how anything could be worse than suicide but I wasn’t going to argue the point, especially now that I was beginning to suspect why the _vestigium_ had affected Nightingale so much more than me.

“We could tell them the truth,” I said.

We turned onto the Addisons’ street and Nightingale glanced at me. We were between streetlights and his face was in shadow, but I thought he looked doubtful. “The whole truth?” he said. “You want to tell them their mother is a werewolf?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Are you sure that’s wise?”

“I think they can keep a secret,” I said. “Besides, who would believe them if they talked? And they deserve to know what really happened.”

We reached the Jag and Nightingale unlocked the doors. “You may be right,” Nightingale admitted. “We can’t tell them anything until morning, at any rate. For now, let’s get you to a hospital and have that bite looked at.”

“We should swab it first,” I said. “Dr. Walid will kill us if we don’t get a DNA sample.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Nightingale said. “If he kills you now he won’t be able to study you if you turn into a wolf on the next full moon.”

“Very funny,” I said, and with a faint smile Nightingale started the engine and pointed us in the direction of London.


End file.
